20 things silently burning your AI budget: 1/ Opus on every task > the same call costs 25x more than Haiku. your agents are expensive by default, not by necessity 2/ no spending alerts > you find out about the $400 day when the invoice arrives 3/ agents running crons every 5 minutes > 288 calls a day on a task that needs 4 4/ no token limits on agent loops > one runaway loop and you wake up to a $300 bill 5/ system prompts you wrote in week 1 > you are paying to send 2,000 outdated tokens on every single call 6/ no output caching > your morning brief hits the same API 12 times for the same data 7/ context that never compresses > agent drags 40 conversations of history into every new call 8/ API retries with no backoff > one timeout triggers 20 retries in 60 seconds. you pay for all of them 9/ idle agents nobody audits > three of your crons are running tasks you stopped caring about in month 2 10/ streaming responses nobody reads > billing starts when the stream opens. if nobody sees it, you paid for nothing 11/ no cost per outcome tracking > you know your monthly bill. you have no idea which agent is actually worth it 12/ agents summarising content you never open > you are paying for 10 briefs a week. you read 2 13/ tools that call APIs inside tool calls > one agent action silently becomes 8 API hits 14/ embedding data you query twice a year > you paid to index it. you will never use it ...